India’s darknet hackers mint bitcoins from illegal assignments

Several of these hackers are engineering or computer science students or young professionals with day jobs, confident that the encrypted world they operate in won’t give them away.Shashwati Shankar | ET Bureau | September 22, 2017, 07:54 IST

BENGALURU: Joy D’Souza is a 20-yearold computer science student, freelance website designer and a darknet hacker. Which is to say he operates in an alternative Internet universe where most things are illegal and not easily accessible to commoners.

He belongs to a small but growing tribe in India that earns handsome sums from assignments such as breaking into email or Facebook accounts or electronically spying on a rival, somewhat similar to regular black hat or illegal hackers. Several of them are engineering or computer science students or young professionals with day jobs, confident that the encrypted world they operate in won’t give them away.

D’Souza boasts of having hacked into a politician’s computer. “I got paid around 0.20 bitcoins (or about $800) for this task,” said D’Souza, using a pseudonym as did the other half a dozen hackers that ETspoke with for this report. “The pricing varies on the level of difficulty and urgency.”

The darknet can be accessed by software known as TOR to browse hidden websites anonymously as well as gain access to both legal and illegal services from hackers, among other activities. The TOR network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet by separating identification and routing.

“You usually have no clue who your hacker is unless you become a regular client and form some kind of trust, but usually we trust no one,” said Rahul Panwar, a 28-year-old darknet hacker with a day job as a consultant for one of India’s largest technology companies.

For simple tasks such as hacking email and Facebook accounts, the hackers charge $100-250 in bitcoins.

Not Much Awareness YetFor more complicated assignments such as spying into someone’s computer, the rate is $600-700, or upwards if the individual to be spied on is high-profile. For hacking a webserver, the price is about $1,000 in bitcoins.

“And for a targeted attack on a specific user or company, a hacker could charge around $2,000 in bitcoins,” said Sheena Seth, a 35-year-old hacker employed with a startup as a software engineer.

Several of the assignments are born out of personal grudges and emotional distress, seeking in the hackers a last resort. Seema Singh (name changed), a 27-year-old engineer with a Bengaluru startup and a victim of revenge porn, reached out to a darknet hacker to get even with her former lover.

She engaged the hacker to get rid of the video clip that had been circulated among friends and family from as many digital platforms as possible. And also to hack her former lover’s computer to get access to naked photographs of him. Those, she sent to his friends as well as potential future love interests. “I went from being hurt to angry and decided to share his photos, which I knew were saved in a folder on his desktop, with select people to embarrass him and teach him a lesson,” said Singh.

Unlike Singh, most of the clients are from abroad since there is not much awareness yet in India on how to access a TOR network and rent a hacker’s services. According to cybersecurity experts and Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officials, while it is difficult to track darknet hackers in India there aren’t many of them. “We do not have a specific device or system to know how many Indian hackers are functional,” said a CID official speaking on condition of anonymity. “We estimate that a few thousand of them exist.”

“Clients typically reach the hackers through coded communication because serious hackers won’t risk their identity being known,” said Sunil. “Payments are made only in bitcoins and the client is usually charged the equivalent of a few lakh rupees.”

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